Breakfast is a Dangerous Meal: Why You Should Ditch Your Morning Meal For Health and Wellbeing

And though the Harvard scientists have since had to shed that particular cause-and-effect paradigm, they seem to have adopted stress as a cause instead. Dr Leah Cahill was the lead author of the 2013 HPFS coronary heart disease study, and she revealed what she believes to reporters from Texas A&M University’s newsletter and Forbes magazine, who wrote that: ‘Cahill says that fasting is a stressful state for the body, so prolonging the fast by not eating when you wake up amplifies the stress.’

Dr Cahill repeated the same message when she spoke to the BBC, saying that skipping breakfast and so not ‘breaking fast’ put extra strain on the body.

But I can find no actual evidence from Harvard showing skipping breakfast to be stressful.

Indeed, another clue that the successive HPFS studies do not provide the final word on breakfast was shown by their contradictory results over eating frequency: their different studies could not agree on the optimal numbers of meals to be eaten daily:

i In 2007 (the weight gain study) the HPFS scientists reported that ‘an increasing number of eating occasions … was associated with a higher risk of 5-kg weight gain’

ii In 2009 (the type 2 study) they reported that ‘compared with men who ate 3 times a day, men who ate 1–2 times a day had a higher risk of type 2 diabetes’ (i.e. a decreasing number of eating occasions was associated with a higher risk of type 2)

iii And in 2013 (the coronary heart disease study) they reported that ‘No association was observed between eating frequency … and risk of coronary heart disease’ (all my italics).

Since breakfast skipping is itself a variation in meal frequency, these contradictory findings suggest not that breakfast skipping leads to weight gain, diabetes and coronary heart disease but, rather, that a separate set of factors leads both to breakfast skipping and to the diseases.

Cambridge UK: Harvard is situated in Cambridge, MA, but the scientists in Cambridge UK are also fans of breakfast. In one study the Cambridge epidemiologists wanted to know how breakfast determined weight gain, so they performed a cross-sectional or ‘snapshot’ study. They recruited some 6,800 middle-aged men and women, some of whom, of course, happened to eat light breakfasts, while others happened to eat big ones.

The research team asked their subjects (i) what they typically ate for breakfast, and (ii) what else they typically ate during the course of the day. The research team then weighed them, finding that the more food they ate at breakfast, the more calories overall they consumed, yet the lighter they weighed, i.e.:

eat breakfast → consume more calories → weigh less???

The research team had apparently, therefore, reaffirmed the (in)famous breakfast paradox: the team had confirmed that satiety is a myth (the more the subjects ate at breakfast, the more they ate overall), but since the breakfast eaters were slimmer than the skippers, the paradox had apparently re-emerged. But paradoxes emerge only when a false paradigm hits reality, so which paradigm were the researchers working to? Here is an extract from the introduction to their paper: ‘[Studies show that] regular breakfast consumption is associated with successful maintenance of weight loss, suggesting that consuming fewer calories in the morning or skipping breakfast could contribute to the development of obesity.’

So the researchers were working to a cause-and-effect paradigm:

eat breakfast → eat more food overall → lose weight

or

skip breakfast → eat less food overall → gain weight

which makes no sense. But if we adopt a different paradigm:

No history of dieting, therefore brisk metabolism

↓

therefore can afford to eat breakfast

↓

yet still lose weight

or alternatively:

History of dieting, therefore slow metabolism

↓

therefore cannot afford to eat breakfast

↓

yet still gain weight

then we have a model that is not paradoxical. So if we rewrite the introduction to the paper, we can keep the first half of the sentence, which contains the facts, but we can change the conclusion: ‘[Studies show that] regular breakfast consumption is associated with successful maintenance of weight loss, suggesting that slim people can afford to eat breakfast and to consume more calories.’

The Cambridge researchers then reinforced their observations by performing a cohort study analogous to the one Hill and Doll performed on smokers. They followed their subjects over the next 3.7 years, finding that on average:

all their subjects gained weight as they aged

the people who ate the lightest breakfasts gained some 1.25 kg

those who ate the biggest breakfasts gained only some 0.8 kg

even though they apparently consumed, on average, 82 calories a day more than the small breakfast eaters.

Yet again, the researchers had apparently uncovered the (in)famous paradox. But they then did an odd thing. They interpreted their findings to conclude that the

‘redistribution of daily energy intake, so that a larger percentage is consumed at breakfast and a lower percentage is consumed over the rest of the day, may help to reduce weight gain in middle-aged adults.’

Yet that is not the full conclusion of the paper’s own logic or data: the researchers showed that the more breakfast their subjects ate, the more food they also ate. So using the researchers’ own logic and their own data, the full conclusion is: ‘To keep slim, eat more at breakfast, and ensure your total food intake also goes up.’ Which makes no sense, which is why I assume the Cambridge scientists didn’t draw the logical conclusion of their own data.

Cambridge and Dr Farshchi: The Cambridge scientists knew their findings were paradoxical, so to explain them they invoked the work of Dr Farshchi, from the University of Nottingham.

Dr Farshchi was a researcher who had examined the insulin responses of ten women, finding that when they skipped breakfast, their circulating levels of insulin rose (and vice versa, the levels of insulin in breakfast eaters fell).

Since insulin makes you fat, the Cambridge researchers suggested, the paradox was therefore solved:

skip breakfast → secrete more insulin → get fat

or

eat breakfast → secrete less insulin → stay slim

Hold on. Eat breakfast and secrete less insulin? Skip breakfast and secrete more? The whole point of insulin is that it rises when we eat (I discuss this at greater length later), so what’s happening when the more that people eat, the less insulin they secrete?

Well, it turns out that when Dr Farshchi’s subjects ate breakfast, they ingested less food overall. And vice versa: when they skipped breakfast they ate more overall. They were anomalous. This was something that Dr Farshchi signposted himself, writing that his findings were ‘at variance with previous studies’. (The previous studies show, of course, that breakfast eaters, like the Cambridge team’s subjects, consume more calories.)

So Dr Farshchi’s findings cannot resolve the Cambridge researchers’ paradox, because the Cambridge team’s breakfast eaters ingested more food overall whereas Dr Farshchi’s breakfast eaters ingested less.

I hope I have not been unfair to the Cambridge scientists, whose papers are, rightly, widely read, and whose data can be trusted unreservedly, and who are scrupulously honest, but we do need to know if eating breakfast is good or bad for us, and if we adopt their paradox we have to conclude (in my summary of their logic) that:

to keep slim, eat more at breakfast and ensure your total food intake also goes up

whereas if we refuse to accept a paradox, then the data suggest that:

to keep slim, skip breakfast, which will lower your total food intake.